Cracking the Code of Facebook Advertising Policies | Trevor W. Goodchild

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simplify TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Trevor W. Goodchild, AI prompt engineer and Facebook policy specialist. Trevor worked at Facebook in ads tech and project management. He's a public speaker, successful blogger, and a bestselling sci-fi author. Mark Zuckerberg announced his last project internally. While at Microsoft, Trevor launched the Xbox 360 and the first iPod Nano when he was at Apple. His clients have included the ad agencies of Tony Robbins, Harv Eker, and Dean Graziosi. Trevor guides advertisers to make sense of the madness and get Facebook ads live. Again, Trevor, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Trevor W. Goodchild: So glad to be here, David. Thanks for having me. David McBee: So glad to have you. So here on Simpli.fi TV, we speak directly to media buyers and advertising agencies. These are professionals who are usually pretty competent when it comes to working with Facebook. So what is the most common question or complaint that you hear from folks like that? Trevor W. Goodchild: My Facebook ad account has been disabled. I don't know why. Facebook won't tell me what I did wrong, or how to get Facebook ads live again. David McBee: And I understand that you have some answers to those questions, right? Trevor W. Goodchild: Yeah, I've worked at Facebook really deep. I went from working in ads to working in tech, supporting Facebook servers and remote access tools. So Nike ran 50,000 ads in 30 seconds on Black Friday, and the servers like, oh, I can't handle this, and then it gets shut down. I was the one getting the phone call at 3:00 AM in the morning on my Facebook phone, having to troubleshoot with the engineers in Menlo Park on getting Facebook ads live again, because when they're down, Facebook loses millions of dollars. So I have a bit of expertise here working with the engineers that created these automations. And with three billion daily active users on Facebook, Facebook has a lot to keep track of. And so it's really hard to answer the question of how do I fix a Facebook disabled ad account without first addressing the specific industry that you're in. Because how Facebook ad automations apply the SQL Logic based flagging system from one app to the next really depends on what model of business are you using? Are you doing weight loss? Are you doing beauty? Are you doing how to start a business? Are you just a marketing firm selling marketing services? Based on which niche that you're actually in, Facebook automations will flag you differently. And I think a lot of people don't look at that. They don't dial down specifically to see how do Facebook's policy bots flag me specifically versus another industry? And so the short answer is you really want to audit your funnel for policy violations as a preventative rather than after the fact for damage control method to prevent ad shutdowns. But this does get pretty granular and specific when it comes to what type of business you're running and what type of flags you're going to get based on that. David McBee: So is it mostly just policy conflicts that causes this happening all the time? Trevor W. Goodchild: Well, it's a number of driven things. And a lot of ad campaigns get rejected because of the fact that you look at where advertising started. You look at some old school copywriting tips from Robert Bly or even the grandfather of marketing and advertising Eugene Schwartz with his breakthrough advertising. The whole classic PPS problem pain solution formula that talks about kicking the pain points and then offering [inaudible 00:03:58] work great for door flyers, windshields flyers, or in mail marketing. But since we've started digital marketing, things have changed, game has changed. And people often forget, and that agencies, that Facebook, it's not a public school, it's not a government entity, it is a private website [inaudible 00:04:16] by one dude. Zuckerberg has to make sure that what is being put on his platform doesn't make him liable. And so as a result of that, there's a really, really hard line that isn't as distinguishable in the sand for what is allowed or what's not allowed. As a result, people that start running ads on Facebook with a conversions first focus often don't realize that they're operating within the echo chamber of Facebook. The ecosystem that Facebook has that's specific to Facebook requires more education as far as what you can and cannot do. It's not the same as classical advertising. David McBee: So is there a good resource for them to go and learn the best ways to advertise on Facebook? Trevor W. Goodchild: Well, unfortunately, here's the problem that happens a lot of times, is even if you try to get familiar with Facebook's ad policies on their website, there's new ones all the time. And every time a new Facebook ad policy gets released on the platform, the automations have to integrate it in a learning mode with the rest of the policies until it works correctly. So there'll be a lot of incorrect flagging in the beginning, but one of those things is that it's hard to distinguish exactly what's going on when a bot flags your ad because there's very little description of what to do. They usually say you're violating our ad policies, therefore we had to shut you down. Which policy? Why? How do I get my ads active again? There isn't a lot of advice out there about that. On my blog, jetskishaman.com, I offer from my experience working at Facebook, some really good hands-on guidance on what to do in specific situations. David McBee: Any examples of what we might find on that blog? Trevor W. Goodchild: Well, a golden nugget I could drop as far as some of the information that I share on the blog that is also really helpful for advertisers is the fact that a lot of times, people want to immediately jump to saying, oh, Facebook made a glitch. It's a Facebook bug. That's why I've been shut down. I wasn't doing anything wrong. Nine out of 10 times, if I'm auditing someone's funnel and I'm looking at the ads they've ran, I'm like, oh, no, you violated the policies here, here and here. The problem is transparency. Facebook's not going to explain the kind of subtext or context in between the lines of what the automations are doing and how they're flagging. Really, one of the biggest golden nuggets I can drop for your audience of media buyers and ad agencies and the like is the fact that more often than not, what I see is that Facebook's mistake isn't in flagging and shutting down the ad. It's actually in approving it in the first place. When I was working at ads in Facebook, I once had to shut down an ad that was advocating the genocide of all Americans, and it was like, what's your unique selling proposition here? What's your value ad? There was no product. He was just... But can you believe it? This ran for two weeks straight before we caught it and shut it down. So that's an extreme example, but more often than not, you'll see ads that should have never been approved, and as a result, ad agencies have a false baseline. Now they think, oh, well because these ads were approved in the past, we'll run a hundred more like that. The problem is that even if you only had one flag on that original ad that slipped under the radar, they're going to count that one flag a hundred times for each ad that it's in not just one flag separately. And so people were like, oh, my ad account quality dashboard on the ads tools on Facebook shows me I have 47 violations. How could I have done this? When really it's just one flag repeated over 47 ads because they thought based on a previous ad that was mistakenly approved, that that was their baseline they could base all their advertising strategies based upon. So that's one of the biggest gold nuggets I could drop, is just because it's approved doesn't even mean it's compliant. You have to look a little closer to make sure that you are following Facebook ad policies. David McBee: That is a really good golden nugget too. It basically says you got away with it before, but that is not the baseline. That does not mean you can get away with it going forward. Right? Trevor W. Goodchild: Right. And one of the biggest questions I get from my clients, and I've talked with thousands of advertisers both working at Facebook and in my own private firm, is, oh, but they're doing it. How are my competitors able to do this? I'm like, well, they are for now, but a few weeks they'll probably get shut down and then contact me. Because it's only temporary a lot of times. And that temporary could be six months, it could be two years where people have run ads that shouldn't have ever been allowed. It's just a bandwidth issue. Facebook is a huge website. There are trillions of pieces of data on there that Facebook has to monitor for a regular content on the newsfeed as well as ads, and they don't catch everything often for a long time. But that doesn't mean, like you said, just because you got away with it doesn't mean that you're going to continue to. David McBee: So let's say I'm running an ad. I've been running the ad for six months like you said, and it suddenly it's shut down. I look at the ad, I look at the policies. It seems perfectly benign to me. I cannot figure out for the life of me what policy I have broken because as you said, there's no transparency. Where do I go from there? Trevor W. Goodchild: Well, I think it's important to really shift the lens. Because what happens is a lot of times people feel very victimized by Facebook, and I'm not saying they haven't really been responsible for victimizing a lot of people. Can you imagine being a small business owner of a jewelry shop? Half your revenue from the year comes from a Black Friday sale and Facebook shuts you down because you said one word incorrectly, and they won't tell you which word it is or what to do? That's terrible. And now their families are going without as much revenue for the holiday season to buy presents for their children. Facebook has caused a massive amount of damage in local communities for small to medium-sized business owners. So I would say it is easy to get into the victim mindset when Facebook puts down the [inaudible 00:10:11], but really the best thing to do is kind of put on a detective lens and to look at your ads through how Facebook looks at them. What is Facebook's big mission statement? They talk about connecting people, making connections. They want people to stay on the platform. They want people to be engaged in the platform. When you look at your ads through the lens of Facebook and try to pretend that you're a Facebook bot and speak bot language and understand, okay, if I'm a bot that's extremely conservative of what I allow to be on the platform, is there anything that could be misinterpreted? I don't know. We may all have that friend that is really easily offended by almost anything. Or maybe you've seen them in TV shows or you have friends of friends that are like that. Imagine you're that person and then look at your ads. And as silly as that sounds, it can often help if you really raise the bar on how strict you are scrutinizing your own ads, instead of giving yourself a pass because you made them. Think about this from, hey, I have a user base. I want to protect them. What here could threaten that? What here could sound spammy or overreaching or exaggerated or sensational? What here sounds realistic? In one of my blogs I talk about how do Facebook automations actually perceive the content you release? And it's really like a 1950s domestic moral authority kind of viewpoint. It's not very progressive. It's very play it safe. Oh, they could be saying this, they could be saying that, but shut it down because it's very protective of the user base because that's Facebook's money. So if you put on kind of that lens when you look at your ads, it can definitely help. And of course, I'm always here to help to audit funnels too. David McBee: Trevor, this has been crazy helpful. A lot of good information in this episode. Thank you so much. Before we go, I like to ask all of my guests if they have a podcast or a book that they'd like to give a shout out. Trevor W. Goodchild: Definitely. I would say locally here in Austin, Texas where I'm at, Ryan Levesque, he wrote The Ask Method, which is an incredible book, which switches your whole frame of reference as well. Instead of trying to just force people to buy something or sell to customers, he says survey your audience, put them in buckets, and then give them what they already want, but aren't receiving. Such a great hack for learning how to market effectively. David McBee: Awesome. And what is the best way for viewers to learn about you? Trevor W. Goodchild: Well, you can go to my website, jetskishaman.com, which it's a whole story behind that name, but jet ski, like you're on the lake on a jet ski. Shaman, like you're practicing magic. So jetskishaman.com. Or my email trevor@trevorwgoodchild.com is always a great way to reach me. David McBee: That has nothing to do with what you've talked about, but I can't get that image out of my head. Trevor W. Goodchild: Well, actually, so I was out during a 4th of July a few years ago wading in the water, drinking some really nice mixed drinks with apple juice and vodka or something, and this guy rode up. It's like sunset, this guy rode up with sunglasses on smoking a cigarette on a jet ski, and he said, you know those million dollar ideas you have when you're high on cocaine at 3:00 AM in the morning? Go with it. It'll work. And I was like, man. And he just rode away into the sunset, literally. And I was like, "Wow, this guy's like a jet ski shaman." I created the blog after that experience. David McBee: That's awesome. Well, Trevor, thank you so much for being my guest today on Simpli.fi TV. Trevor W. Goodchild: Thanks for having me, David. It was a pleasure. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.